"The U.S. Presidents" by Arthur M. Schlesinger
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| LIFE magazine, November 1, 1948 |
From LIFE magazine, November 1, 1948, pp. 65-74:
Some time ago 55 outstanding authorities in American history were invited by Harvard's Arthur M. Schlesinger to rate the Presidents of the U.S. in five categories; the results, which Professor Schlesinger analyzes in an article beginning on the next page, are illustrated above. The order within each category runs from left to right. Three men were omitted from consideration: William Henry Harrison, who died within a month of taking office; Garfield, shot four months after his inauguration, and Truman, whose record is not yet complete.
THE U.S. PRESIDENTSWhat makes a President great? Or a failure? The verdict of history provides some answersBy ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER
Those who believe that in a democracy people generally get the kind of government they deserve will be heartened by the results of an informal presidential rating poll which I conducted not long ago among my colleagues in American history and government (p. 65). Only two of our past Presidents were labeled "failures"; four were judged "near great"; and six received the accolade "great."
There was a large measure of agreement among the "experts" within the important categories of great, near great and failures. The six greats—Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilson, Jefferson and Jackson, in that order—had no close runners-up, though Lincoln was the only one to get all 55 votes for the top rank.
Among the four near great—Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, John Adams and James K. Polk—the selection of Polk will no doubt surprise most readers. Polk's position in American history has been unjustly neglected. His record in the White House was an exceptional one. A coldly practical and methodical man, Polk set himself certain precise objectives to be achieved while he was President, and achieve them he did during his single term of office from 1845–49. He lowered the tariff, re-established the independent treasury system for public funds and completed the westward expansion of the country. To get Oregon and Washington he risked the threat of war with Great Britain. And he did go to war with Mexico to acquire California and most of the territory of the present states of our Southwest.
The failure rating went to two postwar Presidents, Grant and Harding. Theirs were the only administrations in American history which can be described as riddled with corruption. As President they were both far beyond their depth. Grant allowed himself to become the dupe of crafty swindlers, speculators and plain grafters who rocked the country with schemes involving watered railroad stock, defrauding the government of taxes due on whisky, selling Indian trading-post concessions and raising congressional salaries (while doubling the President's). Grant indulged freely in nepotism, appointing a number of his relatives to various government posts, but he was otherwise personally untouched by the profiteering which went on around him. The greatest scandal of his administration followed the famous attempt by Gould and Fisk, with the aid of Grant's brother-in-law, to corner the gold supplies of the country, an attempt which almost came off and resulted in the Black Friday panic of 1869.
What the glitter of gold was to Grant's administration, the smear of oil was to Harding's. There was the Teapot Dome affair, in which lavish bribery influenced the sale of government oil lands, and corrupt practices were also uncovered in the Veterans' Bureau, the office of the Alien Property Custodian and even the Attorney General's office. Three of Harding's Cabinet appointees were forced to resign, one going to prison. Harding was an amiable, easy-going man who had been pushed into office by machine politics and the ambitions of his wife. His death, after two and a half years in office, undoubtedly was hastened by his consciousness of having betrayed the public interest.
The judgments reached in this poll, of course, are based entirely on the performance of these men as President. The total contribution to statesmanship of some was greater—and of some, less—than their contribution as chief executive. As one of those who voted in the poll remarked, "If the whole sum of the man's work were considered, certain of my ratings would be different. Madison and John Quincy Adams would go in the first group. Polk, by contrast, was better as President than he was in general, and Grant was much worse." Another commented, "This inquiry makes you realize how lucky some of the Presidents were in their times, and how others no less able suffered the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.'"
Were the six great Presidents merely "lucky in their times"? Or was greatness inherent in them? Let us see what kind of composite portrait we can draw of the six great Presidents.
In appearance and temperament they differed as much as six men can. Lincoln we remember as the shambling-gaited, gaunt man of simple humanity whose speeches were like authentic religious statements and whose jokes were like parables. The impeccably dressed Washington personified the cavalier tradition of Virginia at its most heroic and austere. Roosevelt combined urbane sophistication with deep feeling, impishness with evident dedication to the job which he filled despite the handicap of partial paralysis. Wilson, the man who loved humanity but so conspicuously lacked the human touch, retained all his life the manner of a thin-lipped college professor; he was dry, didactic and determinedly rational. Jefferson was a complex, many-sided man, a skilled architect, ingenious inventor, profound political scientist and adept practical politician, musician and philosopher, a Virginian who did not use tobacco or hard liquor and once received the British minister in dressing gown and slippers. Jackson was the hothead of the six, a duelist, celebrated for profanity and stubbornness.
The pattern of the great Presidents
It is in the administrations directed by these men that we can find a common pattern. The greats were indeed "lucky in their times": they are all identified with some crucial turning point in our history. As our first President, Washington got the infant republic on its feet. Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase was our first territorial expansion, pushing back the western boundary from the Mississippi to the Rockies. Jackson put down an attempt at secession on the part of South Carolina and acted to right the imbalance between the eastern moneyed interests and the Western and Southern farmers. Lincoln preserved the Union through four years of bloody civil war. Wilson's "New Freedom" and Roosevelt's "New Deal" introduced far-reaching changes in the social and economic structure of the country, and both men led the U.S. to intervene in world wars and the making of international peace. All six by timely action achieved timeless results.
All of them, moreover took the side of progressivism and reform as understood in their day. It is true that Washington's administration resembled in manner and tone a European court, and that Washington himself (like Franklin Roosevelt later, but for different reasons) was charged by his opponents with harboring kingly ambitions. But we cannot ignore the fact that Washington led the revolt against monarchical Britain, and his lasting contribution as President was to demonstrate the workability of what he called "the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people." Jefferson's party, the Democratic-Republicans as they were then called, was the party of the small farmers and the nonpropertied class. Jackson destroyed the overweening power of the United States Bank which gave financial interests special privilege in the use of public funds. Lincoln, confronted with armed revolt, summoned the North to "settle this question now, whether, in a free government, the minority have the right to break up the government," and in settling the question took action which ended by transforming four million slaves into human beings. Wilson and Roosevelt expanded the government's authority over business and industry, fought concentrations of economic power at home and became spokesmen for the cause of democracy throughout the world.
To their contemporaries the six great Presidents often seemed politically ahead of their times, but they had to be careful not to get too far ahead. They had to work experimentally within the framework of the democratic tradition as it had been handed down to them. Political considerations permitted them to be idealists if they liked, but not doctrinaires. "What is practical must often control what is pure theory," wrote Jefferson the chief executive, no doubt with a view to placating Jefferson the political theorist. As James Russell Lowell put it in his essay on Lincoln, the ultimate test of statesmanship is not a "conscientious persistency in what is impracticable" but rather, "loyalty to great ends, even though forced to combine the small and opposing motives of selfish men to accomplish them." Presidents who considered themselves strategists in the public interest had to practice the tactics of political management, thus bringing down on their heads the wrath of the pure-minded among their supporters.
They were party men
The six great Presidents were all party men and, with the exception of Washington, they all had their hearts set on becoming President. After election they functioned as party chiefs as well as chief executive, using the powers of the one to back the other. Washington was not a party man from the beginning, but as President he declared that to appoint a member of the opposition to office "would be a sort of political suicide." These are facts which are generally overlooked by posterity because it is so far removed from the heat of earlier party battles and because it first meets the great figures of the past enshrined as wax figures in schoolbooks.
As administrators the six great Presidents did not distinguish themselves. Some of them, indeed, were in this regard distinctly inferior to men who were otherwise mediocre. The American tradition, rightly or wrongly, dismisses as unimportant the aspect of the President as manager of our national government. We value the ends of public policy over skill in executing it. Franklin Roosevelt said, a week after his election in 1932, "The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That is the least part of it." Judged in the light of his later performance, this sounds like what lawyers call a plea in avoidance. Jackson and Lincoln would probably have endorsed Roosevelt's view, as well as his description of the presidency as "pre-eminently a place of moral leadership." It was the exercise of moral leadership that won these men their popular acclaim and the lasting regard of posterity.
The great Presidents were strong Presidents. Each of them magnified the executive branch at the expense of the other branches of the government. They acted on the premise that "the President," as Woodrow Wilson wrote while he was still an academic student of public affairs, "is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can." They had to be strong to break down inertia and overcome opposition to the programs they wanted to carry out. Recalcitrant Congresses were reluctant to pass legislation asked by the Executive; supreme courts sometimes declared wanted measures unconstitutional when they were passed.
The methods used by these Presidents to get action out of Congress varied with their temperaments and the times. Washington simply overawed the legislative branch with his enormous personal prestige as the military hero of the Revolution and his godlike position as "father of his country." Jefferson preferred to work behind the scenes, pulling party strings in caucuses and overseeing the judicious distribution of patronage. Later executives leaned more on public opinion. They appealed directly to the voters when Congress balked. Jackson was the first to use his veto power extensively. He also exploited the possibilities of a disciplined party press. Wilson revived the practice, which Jefferson had abandoned, of making personal appearances before Congress. Roosevelt's voice worked political magic over the air waves. In our day a vivid personality and gifts of showmanship have become indispensable prerequisites of presidential leadership. This points up one of the weaknesses of our political system, for men who might make good Presidents often make poor candidates, and so get no chance at the office.
With the supreme court all but one of the six great Presidents sooner or later found themselves in conflict. The exception was Washington—and he appointed all the judges of the court with which he had to deal.
Strong leaders arouse strong opposition. Business interests resist anything new in the way of controls; politicians usually prefer to let well enough alone; Congress resents executive "encroachments"; the opposition party views everything with alarm. Moreover big Presidents often have big faults which, seen at close range, are apt to appear magnified still more. As a result the great Presidents fell foul of the bitterest antagonisms inside their own parties as well as elsewhere. Even the comparatively sacrosanct Washington was not immune. As he remarked, he was assailed "in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter or even to a common pickpocket." When he retired an opposition paper rejoiced that "the man who is the source of all the misfortunes of our country ... is no longer possessed of power to multiply evils upon the U.S."
The press has regularly thrown the weight of its influence against the great and near-great Presidents in their election campaigns, with the exception of Washington. The majority of newspaper editors tried to defeat Jefferson and Lincoln when they first ran for the presidency, fought Jackson and Wilson both times when they were candidates and lambasted Roosevelt in all four of his campaigns.
The task of being a great President would seem to be more rewarding to the nation than to the man in office. A few, to be sure, were exhilarated by the ordeals of office, but all looked for abiding satisfaction in the verdict they expected history to render on their service.
That verdict is favorable not only to them, but to the political system which put them in office. More than a third of our Presidents—10 out of 29—achieved the rank of great or near great, a creditable showing for any system of government.
The common run of our Presidents, as it happens, held office during periods that demanded little of the man in the White House. It is not humanly to be expected that even a young and vigorous nation will always be at its best. Indeed there are periods when the general welfare may call for rest and relaxation. What endows a country with greatness is the ability to produce greatness when it is needed. That test America, up to now, has well met.
